Blogging is popular these days. So popular in fact that even lame ass TechTV has a little blog spot that they do during the screensavers.
There is also a tremendous amount of resources being poured into making it easier to do, and integration tighter. This site runs on MovableType - you knew that already… But thanks to the hard work of people like Ben and Mena, the blog world gets better all the time.
Click below to read my thoughts about blogs, us and virtual communities.
Thanks to blogs, virtual communities are getting easier to do. Sharing ideas, and information is really pretty trivial now. Remember how we were all seeing the death of distance like 7 years ago, because of the internet? Well, what we’re finding is that that that was actually a pretty obvious consequence.
What wasn’t so obvious a consequence was that people might want to find others like them, or maybe not so like themselves. When I worked at the Sporting News, community was a very important idea to keep in mind. We wanted to promote conversation between our users, adn enable some dialogue between them and and us. It was a really amazing thing, how compelling that is. Even if you didn’t like our site, you still came back, just to stay involved!
It seems that what blog technology is doing is promoting that, making it easier to find others, and see what their slice of life is all about. It’s like I have 2 dimensions around me, people that share my interests — peers, and my neighbours, people that are near me.
There’s a couple of guys at University of Chicago who can help us find peers based on the kinds of googling that we do.
I think this is a tremendously cool idea, that should slice through the blogosphere as well. Imagine if what you got back when looking for peers was a list of blogs! What if you got back an RSS feed of everyone that had interests similar to you?
A friend of mine has wanted to create a system for tracking and storing memes. Everything does this and does it really well. But blogs can be the best representattive of ‘meme-space’ if we tap them correctly.
This is why I think that these blog integration tools are so neat. They hope to allow us to tie ourselves together more tightly than ever.
I’m going to publish more here, but I gotta go watch the matrix now…
